Katerina Oikonomou

(1981), Poros, Greece

And There Was Voice (2016)

Photographs by Natalia Tsoukala and Panos Kokkinias for NEON and MAI

Classical music training, opera and aesthetics face deconstruction and denudation in this work by Katerina Oikonomou, who uses her voice to discover the limits of body and spirit. For eight hours, she will produce sounds — classical arias, contemporary songs, voices, screams — that reveal her inner self and the very limits of her vocal chords. Through these sounds, she will overturn and deconstruct the classical aesthetic, the decorum, beauty and stereotypes of the opera form, using her voice as a raw material for the creation of a new sound, stripped back, from scratch.

Katerina Oikonomou has a BS and MS in Food Science from the Agricultural University of Athens. Her studies are in classical singing and modern dance at the Athens Conservatory. She performs classical and modern songs, as well as arias, literature and monologues.